This seminar organised by the DRI and Marsh’s Library introduced participants to the ‘The Archaeology of Reading’ which is an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project to digitize, transcribe, translate and make searchable the marginalia, annotations and other interventions preserved in books from the libraries of Elizabethan scholars, Gabriel Harvey and John Dee. Their books were selected as they are heavily annotated and have good handwriting.

Dee and Harvey’s libraries have been scattered and sold over time, however, despite this thirteen books were identified from the collection of Gabriel Harvey. All interventions were captured, including annotations, drawings, sketches, corrections and underlining. They were then transcribed and converted to XML and displayed in the AOR viewer, an optimized version of the Mirador image viewer.

Scholarship of reading practices and reading strategies has grown based on the work of Professor Anthony Grafton and the late Professor Lisa Jardine, both partners in this project. Based on the marginalia and other interventions captured, this project has begun to compare and analyse early modern reading, and its place within a broader historical context.

Reading Renaissance Marginalia in a Digital Environment at the Royal Irish Academy. Photo by Yvette Campbell, Maynooth University Library

The digitised images of the thirteen books owned and annotated by Gabriel Harvey are fully searchable. Transcriptions of all of Harvey’s annotations and other interventions are accompanied by the text.

To celebrate its launch, the project has published some facts. These are just some of them, which illustrate the vast amount of data produced. The full list can be found at the link below.

This was a fascinating seminar. Each of the speakers spoke knowledgeably and in an accessible manner. Their enthusiasm and engagement with the project was very clear. The Archaeology of Reading project is well worth looking at for anyone with an interest in books and their former owners.